The Driftless Area (14 page)

“Yeah, cut it out,” said Ned. “Nobody stopped him, not just Lyle.”

Shane brought the gun up and pulled the trigger and Lyle fell off the porch and lay in the grass.

“Now I have seen it all,” said Ned.

“Fucking Shane shot me,” said Lyle.

“Oh, you’re not hurt,” said Shane. “Keep it down.”

“Not hurt? You shot him in the heart,” said Ned.

“Well, you push me and you push me and I don’t know what you think is going to happen.”

“This is awful,” said Lyle. “Now I’m going to die in some demented nature preserve, or I don’t even know what it is, that you brought us to because you could not hold on to your own money.”

“You’re not going to die,” said Ned. “We’ll take you somewhere and get you fixed up.”

“How?” said Lyle.
“The car is wrecked to shit.”

“We’ll go slow.”

“Give my money to my sister.”

“What money is that?”

“When we get the money off this kid. My cut goes to my sister. Count it and give her my share, Ned. She works at that copy place. You know. Where you take your résumé. And I have a passbook. It’s not a lot. I think there’s a thousand bucks. I don’t really know. I think it’s in the drawer. Whatever it says. Or if your dog is lost. And you go out with a staple gun. You know her, don’t you?”

“Yeah, Lyle, I’ll get it to her.”

“Her name is Laurie. Give her my money. There’s just kind of a hesitance there. I really like people. But I don’t know how it will end. Ned, step on my hand, will you?”

“Why?”

“To hold it down.”

“No, I’m not going to do that.”

“Do you believe this?”

“Just stay quiet.”

Lyle didn’t last much longer. He died there on the grass. Ned sat down on the edge of the porch and picked up the shell from Pierre’s gun. It was still warm and smelled like a day of hunting.

“Well, I don’t know what to say,” said Ned. “I believe I will be going.”

“That’s okay. I do the work. It’s like that house. I did the work. I killed the people. You just kind of handle the phones.”

Ned stood and brushed off his pant legs. “Lyle was right about you. Now he’s dead and some kid who doesn’t know a goddamned thing probably has a bead on us as we speak. It’s a twelve-gauge, by the way.”

“You taking the car?” said Shane.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll give it a try.”

“Yeah, that’ll probably work.”

“Don’t come back to my place. I’ll put your stuff in a box and mail it wherever you want.”

“I’ll call you sometime.”

Shane knelt, unlacing his boot and staring at the still face of Lyle.

“What are you doing that for?” said Ned.

“They hurt my feet.”

Pierre walked back in the orchard and sat down cross-legged at the base of an old willow where the bark
fanned out, making something like a chair. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as you would think. Kind of cold, though. He took his leather gloves out of his pocket and put them on.

He stayed in that place a long time. He heard the shot that was fired and wondered if Ned and Lyle had turned on Shane and killed him. That would mean Pierre’s part was over. Some time later he saw the light of the car as it made a laborious three point turn and limped from the orchard. That could be them leaving. Maybe this was too optimistic. But someone was leaving. He wondered how far they could possibly get in such a car.

He lowered his head and nodded off. When he woke he looked at his watch. He had slept for twenty minutes. Now there was another light, nearer, not on the road, maybe forty yards up and two or three rows over. That would be the flashlight. It turned in slow circles. It didn’t go anywhere. Pierre watched the light and its monotonous turning for half an hour. If anyone was holding it there was something wrong with him.

He knew how to walk in the woods without making noise. It was all in planting the heels and keeping your weight back until you knew you there was nothing that would snap. But it took a long time.

No one held the flashlight. It turned in midair beneath the branches of an apple tree. Pierre reached up
and found that the light had been suspended by a string and turned it off.

Isn’t that strange, he thought. But now I know.

He turned in time to see the sparks in the trees across the way. Then came the sound. He brought the old Savage gun up and fired, and the kick knocked him down.

A branch cracked and a dark shape fell to the ground like a night bird.

He felt something like a wire in the side of his throat or maybe the blade of a band saw, bright and cold. He brought his hand up and touched the hole that had been made.

What did I care what that light was, he thought.

Above him he saw the moon shining in the blue arms of the branches.

Stella found the first one dead in front of the cabin and the second dying under a tree. She put her hand behind his head and raised it up.

“Did you burn Leslie’s house?” she said.

“You don’t have anything to drink, do you?”

“No. Tell me. Did you do it?”

“It wasn’t hers. I didn’t know.”

“But you did.”

“Yeah.”

“Who helped you?”

“No one.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Ned hired me.”

“And where would he be?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Pierre’s friend.”

“Oh, fuck, of course. You would be.”

“Where’s the one who hired you?”

“You’re all full of light.”

“Don’t look at me.”

“He left in the car.”

“And Pierre.”

“I don’t know, around here somewhere.”

“Did he kill you?”

“Yeah, probably. Very soon I think you will be able to say that. I shot at him but I don’t know what happened. They thought he won. But I knew the light would draw him in.”

“To kill you. Your strategy is no better than you are.”

“I’m not dead yet.”

“Yes, you are.”

Pierre was the last one she found. The grass was dark and glistening with the blood he’d lost.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, damn.”

She fell to her knees and took him by the shoulders and pulled him to her. And there she held him until the light began to come up in the orchard.

TEN

T
ELEGRAM
S
AM
the state policeman came up at dawn on Sunday morning and ran yellow tape from tree to tree across the road where it opened into the orchard. He unfolded plastic sawhorses and arranged them in a line and went back to his cruiser and took a tape measure from the glove box.

A sheriff’s deputy walked up with coffee in a Styrofoam cup. “They’re all three here,” he said.

“And dead,” said the trooper.

“Yes sir.”

“Edmund Anderson said one, when he left.”

The deputy poured the coffee on the ground and shook the cup out. “Well, there’s three now.”

“Pierre Hunter?”

The deputy nodded. “According to his license.”

“Shane Hall.”

“And some other guy.”

“Do you have a camera?”

“I was just getting it.”

“You know I maybe could’ve stopped this.”

“How?”

“I’d heard things. About this Hall, and him looking for Hunter.”

“Well, you heard it, sure.”

“We all did.”

“I didn’t. I don’t even know who they are. But my point is, you hear a lot of things.”

“I agree with that.”

“I probably hear about ten things a day that I could look back at any one of them after the fact and say ‘Oh, sure.’ But I don’t know which ones
,
versus the vast majority of stuff that’s just nothing.”

“Well, you don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“I did talk to him, though.”

“Hunter.”

“Yeah. Tried to get it out of him—what was going on.”

“You can’t help those who will not help themselves. What’d the guy have it in for him about?”

“Oh, some deal. You know. Chance encounter. Unresolved incident from the highway.”

“Well,” said the deputy, “it would seem to be resolved now anyway.”

The reporters began arriving in the bright morning and they stood shifting their legs like eager horses at
the boundary of tape. They looked with longing into the gnarled gray trees where the bodies were.

“All right,” said Telegram Sam. “We will start. And you will have to be patient. There’s a lot we don’t know.”

The Reverend John Morris woke up that morning and got out of bed at the parsonage and showered and shaved and got dressed and sat in the kitchen eating toast and listening to the news on the radio.

At first they said only that some people had been killed and then a little later while he was washing the dishes they broke in on the music to give the names.

He sat down again and smoked a cigarette. He had a flimsy red metal ashtray with fluted edges that kept sliding away from him on the table. So he laid the burning cigarette on the linoleum, got his toolbox from under the sink, and nailed the ashtray to the table, and the ashes bounced all over the place as he hammered.

He picked up the cigarette and ground it out in the immovable ashtray. In a time like this he knew it was customary for a minister to say something profound to the people. And a good minister would do that, he thought: ditch the sermon and come up with something deep and moving—all the more moving most likely for its spontaneous quality.

And God love the ones who can pull that off, but I am not among them, he thought. You’d have to be calm
and wise, and look at me; here I’ve driven a nail into a perfectly good table.

In the afternoon he went to the Jack of Diamonds. It was closed and Keith Lyon and Charlotte Blonde were hanging a black sash across the front below the windows. The pastor helped them, gathering the cloth and holding it off the ground as they worked.

Then they stood back by the road and saw that it looked all right and somber and they went into the tavern, where they sat at a table and drank Ouzo from heavy octagonal glasses that bent the light, and they hardly spoke, because there was nothing to say.

Pierre and Stella walked along the road arm in arm. The dirt was soft and gray and the shadows of the leaves made dark patterns on the ground. They could hear the sound of a stream ahead. Moss colored the stones and elaborate mushrooms sprouted from the bark.

“And then what?” said Pierre.

“You go down them,” she said.

“Down the stairs.”

“Right. And you walk for a long way, and then you come to a room.”

“At the bottom of the stairs.”

“No. You go down the stairs and then you walk for a long way. To a room, with a light and a bed.”

“Like a motel.”

“Yeah, kind of. Like a hotel.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, that’s what it is. So you will know it. And you lie down. Which you’ll want to do because you’ll be very tired. And so you go to sleep. And what you dream becomes your new life.”

“Will I remember this?”

“Probably not. Most people don’t. But I will. And I’ll find you. I promise.”

“Maybe I’ll remember.”

“When I see you again you will. Maybe not all of it. But enough.”

They crossed a low stone wall and walked down to the stream they’d been hearing. There was a small island in the center with the water crashing around it, and a fallen evergreen formed a bridge from the bank. They walked across, holding their arms out for balance. In the center of the little island white boulders framed a slanted green door like that of a storm cellar.

The sign on the door said:

THIS DOOR IS

TO BE KEPT CLOSED

AT ALL TIMES

NO EXCEPTIONS

“This is it,” said Pierre.

“I can’t go with you.”

“Really.”

She put her arms around him and kissed him. “I’m sorry, Pierre. I love you.”

“Maybe you can go with me partway.”

“I can’t.”

Pierre reached down and took hold of the brass handle of the door. “It’s locked,” he said.

“Use the key,” she said.

He took the key from his pocket and turned it in the lock. Then he opened the door and let it down easy on the white rocks. Stone stairs went down into the darkness.

“Well, they probably couldn’t make this much scarier if they tried,” he said.

“I know.” She was crying.

“I would do it all the same,” said Pierre.

He went down the stairs and she watched him go, and when she couldn’t see him anymore she closed the door and sat down on the rocks. She stayed on the island through two nights of rain. Late on the third night she appeared at the Jack of Diamonds, where Charlotte Blonde gave her a change of clothes and Keith fixed her supper and Charlotte took her down to the storeroom and made up the pullout sofa for her to sleep on.

*  *  *

The rain stopped in time for Pierre’s funeral. Musicians came down from Desmond City to play Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor, which Pierre had once played in church. Allison Kennedy and the Carbon Family performed “When the Roses Bloom Again.”

And John Morris gave the eulogy, part of which went like this:

“These are the days when we say ‘at least,’” he said. “Perhaps you’ve heard this in yourself, or a remark that someone has made. ‘At least Pierre was in love.’ ‘At least he got the men with the guns away from the crowded play.’ ‘At least his parents did not live to see what would happen.’ That is one I find particularly strange. Yet this is what we do. We try to find a plan in operation and when we don’t find one we make it up. Ladies and gentlemen, we make it up. This is not to say that there is no plan but only that we in our limited vision cannot see it. How could we? For we are inside a great and wondrous machine that is more or less of a mystery even to those who think about it.

“One man passing through, another coming home. A random moment on the highway. A rental car that collides with a chain in the dark of the woods. Where was this body in relationship to that body. Scraps and maps and rumors in the newspaper. We say that we owe it to Pierre’s memory to know the smallest detail. But I must say I don’t believe it. What happened in that orchard
can’t be known and it can’t be undone, as much as we would have it otherwise.

“What may be in our power to undo, however, is our tragic avoidance of the brevity of life,” said the Reverend Morris. “A friend of Pierre’s told me that in one of their last conversations he expressed the opinion that living is ‘fun.’ ‘How do you mean?’ she asked him. His answer came in three parts, which I would characterize as art, love, and nature. More specifically, Pierre said he found it fun ‘when leaves move.’ Now we may at first glance say, ‘How childish is that?’ but maybe there is something to it. Perhaps what he meant is that this planet and these lives that we have been given are opportunities we do not comprehend. And so we misuse them, day by day. I expect he was only finding that out himself and wanted to tell someone. We look around in space and what do we see? Nothing. No leaves, no life, for who knows how far. And here we are. Are we doing the best we can for each other? For ourselves? Or can we find it in us to be more than we have been? Let us pray.”

It was after the eulogy that the trio from Desmond City played the Elgar song. The music rose like thunderclouds, gathering in the rafters and breaking open in a storm on the lake.

One afternoon, Keith Lyon was sitting and smoking on a bench in the sun when a red-haired woman drove
into the parking lot of the Jack of Diamonds and got out of her car wearing a tan suit with green stitching on the lapels.

“We’re not open till five-thirty,” he said.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I’m here about Pierre Hunter.”

“Well,” said Keith.

“I know,” she said. “I called his apartment the other night and the landlord answered the phone. He told me what happened. Said the place was left a terrible mess.”

“It was, too,” said Keith. “I’ve got to get over there.”

“I met him in the summer,” she said. “I live in Utah and he was going through town and we spent the night together. Then later he sent me some money in a box.”

“So you’re the one.”

“Well, I’ve wanted to talk to him for a while, but it’s taken me this long to find out who he is. The hotel had a record but they couldn’t find it.”

“Are you hungry? Can I make you an omelet or something?”

“No, that’s all right,” she said. “Maybe you could just tell me how to get to the cemetery. I have some flowers I want to lay down.”

“I’ll take you there,” said Keith.

“My name is Linda,” she said.

“I’m Keith, Linda.”

They got in the car and drove down to South Cemetery. It was a warm afternoon and the trees had turned colors all along the hills. Keith felt he might fall asleep in the warmth of the car. He had been very tired lately.

They came to the cemetery, which was high and isolated with a valley reaching out to the west, and they walked out through the stones to a bank of black dirt.

Keith wondered if there was such a thing as a spirit that went on and he doubted it but at the same time wanted to think there might be.

The woman from Utah knelt before the grave and put down the orange lilies she had brought.

“I never got to thank you,” she said. “So . . . you know, thanks. But I couldn’t go through with it.”

She turned to Keith, who was standing with his arms folded in the sun.

“I couldn’t,” she said. “I have the money in the car.”

“Go through with what?”

“Oh, okay. I had told Pierre I might have plastic surgery someday. You know, just casually. And we said it would be expensive. So then two weeks later all this money comes.”

“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but—”

“For the scars,” she said. “On my face. Don’t you see them?”

Keith held his hand out to her and she took it and got up.

“Well, a little bit I do,” he said.

“I talked to some doctors and they said they could maybe reduce them a little but they couldn’t take them away entirely. It’s much less of a sure thing than Pierre and I thought. So I figured if I’m going to have scars anyway I might as well have the ones I made.”

“That makes sense. They’re really not that bad.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Anyway, I have the money. Maybe it should go to his estate.”

“I don’t think he has one.”

“Or family.”

Keith shook his head. “His mother and father are right here.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Did the money have to do with what happened?”

“Yeah, it did. But you shouldn’t feel bad. I think he would have done that no matter what.”

“I don’t feel bad. But strange, I guess. I don’t know how to feel.”

“There’s a lot of that,” said Keith.

They drove from the cemetery back to the Jack of Diamonds. Keith opened the door to get out but said, “The more I think about it, keep the money. He gave it
to you. He never told me for what. I think he wanted you to do whatever you wanted.”

“Let me think about that.”

“Just keep it.”

On the next day Linda met Keith at Pierre’s apartment in Shale. It was ransacked as bad as anything either of them had seen.

“See what they did,” he said.

Everything that could have hidden money and a lot that couldn’t have was gutted or smashed or torn or kicked in or knocked over. It was a universe of shards, shreds, and splinters. You could hardly see floor anywhere.

He traced a flat gray cord from the wall and fished the telephone from the debris and dialed to order a Dumpster. As he waited to talk to someone, he brushed his free hand on his pants and looked at it.

“There’s this silver dust all over everything,” he said.

Keith had brought push brooms and a flat-blade snow shovel and they spent most of the day pushing everything down the length of the apartment and onto the back porch, from which it could be dropped two stories to the Dumpster in the alley. It did not take long for them to see that it would take more than one day.

Around five o’clock Keith’s back began to hurt and he went down the hall and into the bathroom to look
for an aspirin. When he opened the medicine cabinet he found this note taped inside the door:

1883 silver dollar to Charlotte Blonde

guns to Roland Miles

MGA to Carrie Sloan

gray felt hat to Keith Lyon

ice skates to Stella Rosmarin